Today’s episode is guest hosted by Myka Kielbon.

TRANSCRIPT

I’m Myka Kielbon, and this is The Slowdown.

When I was eighteen, I worked at the bookstore at my small college. One of the non-student employees was a guy named Tommy, his style was a holdover from early aughts punk, spiky black hair and thick black rimmed glasses. He had an accent that my memory places in New York or New Jersey. In between taking inventory and placing supply orders, he’d recount to me the plot of “Broad City” episodes or the previous night’s LA Kings game.

One day, Tommy came out of the supply room with a little blue notebook in hand. He passed it over to me. We sold this kind of notebook, but it came in cellophane packaging, which this one lacked. Tommy told me someone returned it and it couldn’t go back on the salesfloor.

“You seem like a writer. You can just keep it,” he told me.

I hadn’t even declared a major, and I wasn’t contemplating English or Creative Writing. In fact, until then I’d never finished a notebook just for myself. No journals or diaries were tucked away in my childhood bedroom with more than five or ten pages of secrets or stories.

But I am a person who wants to rise to the version of myself that other people see. Maybe I hate disappointing people. I’m not very defiant by nature. In fact, I’m often rather compliant. I like to play the part.

Today, I know that Tommy was right. I am a writer. I just needed someone’s permission to start writing.

I’ve filled stacks and stacks of notebooks since. I don’t often go anywhere without one. My journaling practice is not regular, but it is frequent. It is at times voluminous. The action of getting words onto the page is important to me aside from the product of the writing. It soothes me to move my hand across line after line, to fill pages. I like the feeling of my words coalescing around what I do and don’t understand.

I also love to journal as documentation. To remember what happened in my day-to-day, even the small things I see and feel. I can thus make my own life real to myself. This is something I’ve worked out over time. When I look back at that first blue notebook, the recollections are fragmentary and melodramatic. They hardly make sense as a record.

However much I feel a positive value in the process, if I look back at most of my journals, I would think that my life is miserable. Because I often turn to the page when I’m having a tough time, when I have difficult experiences to work through. I love to be alone, but it seems I write the most when I’m feeling lonely in the worst way.

Today’s poem considers, joyously, the anonymous effect that this dynamic could have.

Missed Time
by Ha Jin

My notebook has remained blank for months
thanks to the light you shower
around me. I have no use
for my pen, which lies
languorously without grief.

Nothing is better than to live
a storyless life that needs
no writing for meaning—
when I am gone, let others say
they lost a happy man,
though no one can tell how happy I was.

"Missed Time" by Ha Jin. Originally published in Poetry. Used by permission of the poet.